Dispatches

Television

As England look as though they may finally have a footie team and a manager capable of winning matches, the availability of free-to-air England games is becoming a political football once again.

Even before the team's 4-1 away win against Croatia on Wednesday there were rumblings of discontent about the Irish pay broadcaster Setanta's stance on its exclusive coverage of the away qualifiers.

Kicking off was the Labour MP John Grogan, with a call for home and away highlights to be added to the government's list of protected sporting events. In apparent support were hundreds of England fans at the team's laboured 2-0 victory over Andorra who chanted "We hate Setanta".

The issue became big news after Gordon Brown raised it on the day of the Croatia game, followed on Thursday by a speech by Andy Burnham, in which the culture secretary launched a national debate on football's relationship with finance.

Setanta has argued that offers to show the highlights from the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV failed to "reflect the commercial value of its investment" in buying the rights to England matches for an average of around £5m a game. The company continued to insist that it is happy to talk to secure a terrestrial highlights deal for England's next match, although its price is thought to be in the region of £1m.

Meanwhile, political capital will continue to be made defending the humble fan, starting today at a fringe event at the Lib Dem annual conference. Supporting the debate is research, compiled by Drummond Madell and commissioned by Virgin Media, a major rival to Sky Sports and Setanta, which showed that 73% of the 1,948 fans interviewed who do not subscribe to premium sports channels said that they feel "excluded" from their favourite sport.

Taken nationally that's 6 million people. The survey also links this with discontent about clubs' financial demands on fans, finding that 75% of these fans say that it is too expensive to watch live sports at a stadium or sports ground.

"We have a Premier League with the lowest number of home-grown players in Europe, rip-off ticket prices at our grounds, and rising costs to watch live sport on TV," said Don Foster, Burnham's Lib Dem shadow.

As Foster and others are acutely aware, today's football fan is tomorrow's voter.Ben Dowell

Magazines

Digest revamped

A striking new-look October cover featuring a handsome young man in leather is the first sign that Sarah Sands, editor since May, has overhauled Reader's Digest in pursuit of what the former Sunday Telegraph editor calls "a sharper, more contemporary feel". Other changes inside the magazine include the arrival of a posse of celebrity contributors.

Jemima Khan kicks off I Remember - a regular feature in which well-known figures look back. Julie Burchill looks into the Sally Army and Imogen Stubbs has joined as contributing editor to write adventure stories. Marco Pierre White will write regularly on food, Alexander McCall Smith on ethics, and a quiz will be set by Stephen Fry.

The revamped title now splits into three distinct sections. Digest at the front includes Harry Mount's Word Power column and Ben Schott's monthly Miscellany. Human interest stories dominate the centre section, exemplified by this month's feature on cover star Fynn Vergo - son of the late Juliet Peck, foreign correspondent and founder of the Rory Peck Awards. At the back, The Good Life is home to lifestyle features.

The new look is an attempt to update Reader's Digest's image, according to Sands. "While the name is tremendously famous, a lot of people are hazy about who we are and what we stand for because over a number of years Reader's Digest lost confidence in itself and this, in turn, became visible on the page," she explains.

Media buyers are welcoming the redesign, declaring it "long overdue". "Reader's Digest's sales decline in recent years has been as a direct result of nothing having been done to the magazine for so long," observes Sarah Tsirkas, a group head at the media buying agency Initiative Media. "It looked old-fashioned and staid. People remember it but not as a glamorous or engaging read."Meg Carter

Social networks

Grown-up gossip

Whatever happened to Friends Reunited? The once pioneering social networking site seemed to have faltered in the face of competition from Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, its status not helped by charging a subscription fee. In short, it had become old news.

Old news, however, might just be working for the ITV-owned site. Well, older news in any case. Having dropped its fee and switched to an advertising-funded model in April this year, the site has seen unique users more than double to 5.5 million. According to ITV, Friends Reunited has now carved its own niche as "the social-networking site for grown-ups", with an average user age of over 42 - almost twice as old as Facebook users' average age of just under 23.

"We have concentrated on making the site accessible to people my mother's age," says Jon Clark, head of Friends Reunited. "We've put in place no-nonsense applications which have made the site a hell of a lot more sociable."

Friends Reunited, along with Reunited Dating and the family-tree site Genes Reunited, has targeted older users for some time now, via its over-50s dating site, Friends Over Fifty, which launched in 2007 and now has 970,000 members. There has also been a general increase in older users on social networking sites, with Bebo, Facebook and MySpace all recording increases in the number of over-35s registering this year.

So is this the start of Friends Reunited's glorious reinvention? Social networking consultant and blogger Lloyd Davis thinks it might be a case of too little, too late. "I have the feeling they've squandered their initial 'first mover' advantage," he says. "It's not like newspapers, where traditionally if you can reach a certain readership level it can be sustained. This market is incredibly fickle, and people chop and change."

As the over-35 market grows, Davis also predicts a response from other social networking sites. "The question to ask is: what service are they providing that isn't already being provided somewhere else?"

Given that Facebook has more than 50 million and MySpace 100 million registered users, Friends Reunited is unlikely to be giving either site too much of a headache. But its future strategy is at least looking more joined-up, thanks to the expansion of social networking to include older users. Lanre Bakare